Hitchhiker's Guide gets a thumbs up

Film reduces the blather but retains the high spirits loved by fans of the novel

By AMY BIANCOLLI
For The Chronicle

Don't Panic: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a brilliant entertainment, a beautifully odd duck and a faithful-in-spirit adaptation of Douglas Adams' iconic sci-fi ramble.

Hard-core enthusiasts should be mollified. Everyone else, including genre snobs who wouldn't touch the novel with a stick, should have a corking good time, for here at last is a science-fiction epic with a sense of humor and a proper British fondness for eccentrics. Everyone is alien in Adams' universe — everyone, and no one. It's hard to say who might be hiding an extra head somewhere.

This Hitchhiker (which began as a radio play and was previously rendered for BBC TV) is not a blow-by-blow account of the source material; it's a movie. Much like the Lemony Snicket adaptation, it absorbs elements from the first few books in Adams' series and pops them out in a bright fandango of non sequiturs and crisply animated visual touches. The original novel is breathless and funny, but (sacrilege alert) it does blather on.

The film, whooshed along by a witty and efficient script (from Adams and Karey Kirkpatrick), reduces the blather but retains that crackpot ebullience so beloved to Adams fans. Director Garth Jennings bangs the whole crazy enterprise like a kid with a drum; he never forgets that he's playing with a huge toy, and we don't, either. No deadly seriousness lurks anywhere in this film. Not even when Earth gets vaporized.

The vaporizers-at-large are the Vogons, a hideously schnozzed race of bureaucrats clearing the way for a galactic highway bypass. The (seeming) sole human survivor is one Arthur Dent (Martin Freeman, of the BBC's The Office), who's whisked away in his ugly green bathrobe by an intrepid Betelgeuseian named Ford Prefect (Mos Def, in a total dither).

They hitch a ride with the Vogons, whose leader tortures them by reciting bad poetry and then expels them into the vacuum of space. In the nick of time they're rescued by the highly blond Zaphod Beeblebrox (Sam Rockwell), who is both the president of the galaxy and a moronic narcissist of infinite proportions. (I don't know where Rockwell got his satin short shorts, but they deserve an Oscar category all their own.)

It just so happens that Zaphod and his fed-up babe Trillian (Zooey Deschanel) have stolen a cutting-edge spaceship, the Heart of Gold. This remarkable vehicle runs on an ''improbability drive and delivers its passengers instantly to any point in the universe, but not before transforming them temporarily into sofas or small knit dolls. Thus yields a brief image of the metamorphosed Arthur puking yarn into a basket.

So Arthur, Ford, Zaphod and Trillian go gallivanting about the universe in search of ''the ultimate question," assuming the answer is ''42," and run into a few problems, one of them being John Malkovich as a politician/preacher who prays to a giant hanky. He steals half of Zaphod's brainpower, making him stupider than usual and requiring him to wear an interactive juicer-helmet so Ford can squeeze lemons into his head.

And one more thing. The dolphins. During Hitchhiker's fantastic and fantastical opening credits, Stephen Fry's plummy voice — the same voice that narrates candy-animated excerpts from the title's celebrated guide — tells of Earth's dolphins, whose attempts to warn humans of impending doom are misinterpreted as hoop-jumping pool tricks devised for our amusement. As opening credits close, the dolphins zoom skyward, but not before joining in a chorus of great robustness and cheese. ''So long, so long," they sing, ''and thanks for all the fish." What an infectious beginning to an infectious film. Two hours later, I was still humming.

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